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I don't get this distinction between a taped NFL game and a live NFL game. If you haven't seen it and don't know the outcome, who cares if it's taped? Essentially isn't he just saying "Most Americans I know would rather watch an NFL game than an MLB game"? Or is he calling games you watch on TV "taped" as opposed to games you watch at the stadium? Because if so, that's a dumb way to refer to it. Then again, he seems like a rather dumb guy.

I've spent more time considering this article than I probably should have.

Or in McGuire and Sosa’s case, they wanted to see them hit balls as far as superhumanly possible.

1. Baseball articles in which they spell Mark McGwire's name wrong should be outlawed.

Coming off the 1994 season, which ended prematurely in mid-August due to a player’s strike against the owners, the sport’s popularity was incredibly low, and the only things that could save it were home runs.

I wish people would stop about the popularity of baseball, especially this bogus meme. It was hard hit by the strike, but it was only going to be a season or two for the popularity to bounce back. At the time, almost everyone attributed it's regrowth to Ripken, not McGwire and Sosa. The simple fact of the matter, is that without Ripken, Sosa or McGwire, baseball's popularity was going to rebound.

But to get back on point, while baseball has done well to protect its players, it has suffered in the ratings department, drastically falling behind football and basketball. Baseball is America’s pastime, but most Americans I know would rather watch a taped NFL game as opposed to a live MLB game. By promising fans more runs, which would create more excitement, the sport could reclaim its rightful throne atop America’s sports empire.

Please dear lord save me from the stupidity of people touting ratings as equivalent to popularity. Football is an event more than it is popular. Yes it's popular of course, but it's tv viewing is an event like atmosphere, great marketing, but it's not a direct proxy for it's popularity.

And of course using your twitch like add friends as a comparison the America as a whole is just ridiculous. But baseball is a different viewing experience than other sports, and it's going to appeal to some people and not to others. But I'm pretty confident that in cities with a major league team, the result of the game does matter to people a lot, whether they bother to watch the game or not.

I don't get this distinction between a taped NFL game and a live NFL game. If you haven't seen it and don't know the outcome, who cares if it's taped?

It's probably not the distinction he's going for, but if I could avoid finding out who won before I watched it, I'd much rather watch a taped NFL game than a live broadcast. That way I could skip all the commercials, time outs, and wasted time in between plays and only watch when there was actual action on the field. A three hour NFL game can be cut down to about an hour that way.

I don't get this distinction between a taped NFL game and a live NFL game. If you haven't seen it and don't know the outcome, who cares if it's taped?

It's probably not the distinction he's going for, but if I could avoid finding out who won before I watched it, I'd much rather watch a taped NFL game than a live broadcast. That way I could skip all the commercials, time outs, and wasted time in between plays and only watch when there was actual action on the field. A three hour NFL game can be cut down to about an hour that way.

This. Being in the UK, avoiding NFL scores is pretty easy for me. So I just download them the next day. Commercials and dead time already edited out. Every play of the game takes maybe 30 minutes. It's awesome.

It's probably not the distinction he's going for, but if I could avoid finding out who won before I watched it, I'd much rather watch a taped NFL game than a live broadcast. That way I could skip all the commercials, time outs, and wasted time in between plays and only watch when there was actual action on the field. A three hour NFL game can be cut down to about an hour that way.

And I do the same thing for baseball. I even leave it on a slower fast forward if a slow pitcher is wasting time staring in at the catcher over and over.

Cheating is the way to go... Look what it did for UNLV basketball under Jerry Tarkanian

I don't think Tarkanian did anything a lot of other big programs do. He was just upfront about it. When I was a kid I believed the hype about Tark being evil incarnate, but as I've gotten older, the more I think he was the only honest one of the bunch.

Tark was a genius! Everybody knew he was "cheating" but they could never catch him. Cheating did a lot of good for UNLV and I bet they are drawing, what, 1/3 the crowd they did in their heyday. Not that I want to advocate cheating or anything. :-)